September 20, 2013

FEATURE: London Design Week

London Design Festival was in full swing last week. Here are a few snippets from the team’s visits.

Our Designer Laura went to a talk by Bruno Maag of the renowned font foundry Dalton Maag. Discussed was the importance of future thinking when choosing typefaces, from considering all the applications, to the possible growth and globalization of the corporations and brands. Bruno touched on the many cultural considerations that affect typeface design and the process and factors involved in creating different language sets. One of the most challenging examples is China, where to have a typeface approved by the authorities it needs to comply with the standard GB18030-2005, which requires around 27,500 characters to be submitted for approval! One of the key concerns for typeface choice, however, should always be legibility. Bruno demonstrated this with the controversial example of Comic Sans. Whilst we’re still not sure that Comic Sans is the epitome of legibility and good type design, we are agreed that the talk was very informative, and fun.

Meanwhile our Design Director Sean O’Mara was training for his trip to climb Aconcagua, the highest mountain in The Americas, with a visit to Endless Stair. This is a large art installation consisting of 187 steps made from components which can be configured in various ways.

The project, sponsored by the American Hardwood Export Council, is constructed using cross-laminated American tulipwood, which is both inexpensive and sustainable.

Alex de Rijke of dRMM said: “The brief was to make something that wasn’t just to look at, but from, and that involves some kind of height, and therefore a stair. We thought rather than make an object with a staircase in it, we’d just make a stair, let that be the raison d’etre of the thing. We were also inspired by Escher and we thought it would be fun to pay homage to him.”